Language models (LMs) have become ubiquitous in both NLP research and in commercial product offerings. As their commercial importance has surged, the most powerful models have become closed off, gated behind proprietary interfaces, with important details of their training data, architectures, and development undisclosed. Given the importance of these details in scientifically studying these models, including their biases and potential risks, we believe it is essential for the research community to have access to powerful, truly open LMs. To this end, this technical report details the first release of OLMo, a state-of-the-art, truly Open Language Model and its framework to build and study the science of language modeling. Unlike most prior efforts that have only released model weights and inference code, we release OLMo and the whole framework, including training data and training and evaluation code. We hope this release will empower and strengthen the open research community and inspire a new wave of innovation.
AI foundation models have the capability to produce a wide array of responses to a single prompt, a feature that is highly beneficial in software engineering to generate diverse code solutions. However, this advantage introduces a significant trade-off between diversity and correctness. In software engineering tasks, diversity is key to exploring design spaces and fostering creativity, but the practical value of these solutions is heavily dependent on their correctness. Our study systematically investigates this trade-off using experiments with HumanEval tasks, exploring various parameter settings and prompting strategies. We assess the diversity of code solutions using similarity metrics from the code clone community. The study identifies combinations of parameters and strategies that strike an optimal balance between diversity and correctness, situated on the Pareto front of this trade-off space. These findings offer valuable insights for software engineers on how to effectively use AI foundation models to generate code solutions that are diverse and accurate.
Printed circuit boards (PCBs) are an integral part of electronic systems. Hence, verifying their physical integrity in the presence of supply chain attacks (e.g., tampering and counterfeiting) is of utmost importance. Recently, tamper detection techniques grounded in impedance characterization of PCB's Power Delivery Network (PDN) have gained prominence due to their global detection coverage, non-invasive, and low-cost nature. Similar to other physical verification methods, these techniques rely on the existence of a physical golden sample for signature comparisons. However, having access to a physical golden sample for golden signature extraction is not feasible in many real-world scenarios. In this work, we assess the feasibility of eliminating a physical golden sample and replacing it with a simulated golden signature obtained by the PCB design files. By performing extensive simulation and measurements on an in-house designed PCB, we demonstrate how the parasitic impedance of the PCB components plays a major role in reaching a successful verification. Based on the obtained results and using statistical metrics, we show that we can mitigate the discrepancy between collected signatures from simulation and measurements.
Large language models (LLMs) are recognized as systems that closely mimic aspects of human intelligence. This capability has attracted attention from the social science community, who see the potential in leveraging LLMs to replace human participants in experiments, thereby reducing research costs and complexity. In this paper, we introduce a framework for large language models personification, including a strategy for constructing virtual characters' life stories from the ground up, a Multi-Agent Cognitive Mechanism capable of simulating human cognitive processes, and a psychology-guided evaluation method to assess human simulations from both self and observational perspectives. Experimental results demonstrate that our constructed simulacra can produce personified responses that align with their target characters. Our work is a preliminary exploration which offers great potential in practical applications. All the code and datasets will be released, with the hope of inspiring further investigations.
With the widespread adoption of advanced generative models such as Gemini and GPT, there has been a notable increase in the incorporation of such models into sociotechnical systems, categorized under AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS). Despite their versatility across diverse sectors, concerns persist regarding discriminatory tendencies within these models, particularly favoring selected `majority' demographics across various sociodemographic dimensions. Despite widespread calls for diversification of media representations, marginalized racial and ethnic groups continue to face persistent distortion, stereotyping, and neglect within the AIaaS context. In this work, we provide a critical summary of the state of research in the context of social harms to lead the conversation to focus on their implications. We also present open-ended research questions, guided by our discussion, to help define future research pathways.
Average Treatment Effect (ATE) estimation is a well-studied problem in causal inference. However, it does not necessarily capture the heterogeneity in the data, and several approaches have been proposed to tackle the issue, including estimating the Quantile Treatment Effects. In the finite population setting containing $n$ individuals, with treatment and control values denoted by the potential outcome vectors $\mathbf{a}, \mathbf{b}$, much of the prior work focused on estimating median$(\mathbf{a}) -$ median$(\mathbf{b})$, where median($\mathbf x$) denotes the median value in the sorted ordering of all the values in vector $\mathbf x$. It is known that estimating the difference of medians is easier than the desired estimand of median$(\mathbf{a-b})$, called the Median Treatment Effect (MTE). The fundamental problem of causal inference -- for every individual $i$, we can only observe one of the potential outcome values, i.e., either the value $a_i$ or $b_i$, but not both, makes estimating MTE particularly challenging. In this work, we argue that MTE is not estimable and detail a novel notion of approximation that relies on the sorted order of the values in $\mathbf{a-b}$. Next, we identify a quantity called variability that exactly captures the complexity of MTE estimation. By drawing connections to instance-optimality studied in theoretical computer science, we show that every algorithm for estimating the MTE obtains an approximation error that is no better than the error of an algorithm that computes variability. Finally, we provide a simple linear time algorithm for computing the variability exactly. Unlike much prior work, a particular highlight of our work is that we make no assumptions about how the potential outcome vectors are generated or how they are correlated, except that the potential outcome values are $k$-ary, i.e., take one of $k$ discrete values.
Multi-modal AI systems will likely become a ubiquitous presence in our everyday lives. A promising approach to making these systems more interactive is to embody them as agents within physical and virtual environments. At present, systems leverage existing foundation models as the basic building blocks for the creation of embodied agents. Embedding agents within such environments facilitates the ability of models to process and interpret visual and contextual data, which is critical for the creation of more sophisticated and context-aware AI systems. For example, a system that can perceive user actions, human behavior, environmental objects, audio expressions, and the collective sentiment of a scene can be used to inform and direct agent responses within the given environment. To accelerate research on agent-based multimodal intelligence, we define "Agent AI" as a class of interactive systems that can perceive visual stimuli, language inputs, and other environmentally-grounded data, and can produce meaningful embodied action with infinite agent. In particular, we explore systems that aim to improve agents based on next-embodied action prediction by incorporating external knowledge, multi-sensory inputs, and human feedback. We argue that by developing agentic AI systems in grounded environments, one can also mitigate the hallucinations of large foundation models and their tendency to generate environmentally incorrect outputs. The emerging field of Agent AI subsumes the broader embodied and agentic aspects of multimodal interactions. Beyond agents acting and interacting in the physical world, we envision a future where people can easily create any virtual reality or simulated scene and interact with agents embodied within the virtual environment.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
Diffusion models are a class of deep generative models that have shown impressive results on various tasks with dense theoretical founding. Although diffusion models have achieved impressive quality and diversity of sample synthesis than other state-of-the-art models, they still suffer from costly sampling procedure and sub-optimal likelihood estimation. Recent studies have shown great enthusiasm on improving the performance of diffusion model. In this article, we present a first comprehensive review of existing variants of the diffusion models. Specifically, we provide a first taxonomy of diffusion models and categorize them variants to three types, namely sampling-acceleration enhancement, likelihood-maximization enhancement and data-generalization enhancement. We also introduce in detail other five generative models (i.e., variational autoencoders, generative adversarial networks, normalizing flow, autoregressive models, and energy-based models), and clarify the connections between diffusion models and these generative models. Then we make a thorough investigation into the applications of diffusion models, including computer vision, natural language processing, waveform signal processing, multi-modal modeling, molecular graph generation, time series modeling, and adversarial purification. Furthermore, we propose new perspectives pertaining to the development of this generative model.
AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character. This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles(e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations). Though foundation models are based on standard deep learning and transfer learning, their scale results in new emergent capabilities,and their effectiveness across so many tasks incentivizes homogenization. Homogenization provides powerful leverage but demands caution, as the defects of the foundation model are inherited by all the adapted models downstream. Despite the impending widespread deployment of foundation models, we currently lack a clear understanding of how they work, when they fail, and what they are even capable of due to their emergent properties. To tackle these questions, we believe much of the critical research on foundation models will require deep interdisciplinary collaboration commensurate with their fundamentally sociotechnical nature.
Recent years have seen important advances in the quality of state-of-the-art models, but this has come at the expense of models becoming less interpretable. This survey presents an overview of the current state of Explainable AI (XAI), considered within the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP). We discuss the main categorization of explanations, as well as the various ways explanations can be arrived at and visualized. We detail the operations and explainability techniques currently available for generating explanations for NLP model predictions, to serve as a resource for model developers in the community. Finally, we point out the current gaps and encourage directions for future work in this important research area.